


Tabula Rasa

by the_ragnarok



Series: Abandoned Inception WIPs [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Dubious Consent, F/M, Flashbacks, M/M, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-11-25
Updated: 2010-11-25
Packaged: 2017-12-04 18:25:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/713690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ragnarok/pseuds/the_ragnarok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Arthur is never what people want him to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ABANDONED WIP, PLEASE TAKE HEED.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ( I gave Nurit a flower and an apple and a toy. She ate the apple, tossed the flower, went to play with other boys. )

#1: Nelly Crane.

She was bright-eyed and pale-haired, with freckles on the tip of her nose. She had dimples, which showed when Arthur made a tower from building blocks and said it was for her. 

That was on the first day of kindergarten. On the second, Arthur gave her flowers he picked and the apple from his lunch box. 

She ate the apple, but she dropped the flowers when Jerry Casely talked to her, and stepped on them when she ran to the sandbox to play with him. 

At five, Arthur was far too big a boy to cry over this. It is, however, possible that he sniffled.

~~

Arthur hates to admit it, but he likes the apartment. 

By all reason, he should. Dom constructed it with painstaking care, and he's known Arthur for... More than a decade now, Jesus. Dom also felt guilty for sticking Arthur in this level alone for a month, so it was basic courtesy for him to make it as comfortable as possible for Arthur.

It's got a large kitchen, a big open living-room with huge couches, a bed with an orthopedic mattress, the lighting is excellent. Arthur couldn't really complain about anything except for how he's stuck here for a month.

This wouldn't be a problem in the real world, but here – Arthur obviously can't work. He can't read (the only books he can bring into dreamspace are ones he knows by heart, and what's the point of that?). Listening to music is possible, but tricky, and frankly just not worth the effort.

Dom, considerately, left him a 50,000 pieces puzzle, but Arthur finds he develops an inability to distinguish between shades of yellow if he works on it more than fifteen minutes straight.

And then there's Eames.

"Not bad," Eames says, thoughtfully, leaning against Arthur's dining table. "Not what I'd expect for you, though."

Arthur rolls his eyes. "And what, exactly, did you expect?"

"Mmm." Eames taps his lower lip with a pen. "Something with more of a design to it, y'know? This is all so cozy."

"Maybe I like cozy." Arthur does, actually. He leans back in the recliner, smug in the knowledge Eames can't tip him over.

Eames laughs. "Yeah, that's a good one." He moves over to rifle through the book cases, which are really just for show. "What's this?" he says, delighted, pulling out a battered copy of--

"Now We Are Six," Arthur provides. "A. A. Milne. He wrote Winnie the Pooh."

Eames looks thoroughly disgusted. "Of course I know who he is, I bloody grew up on this." He opens the book. "I found a little beetle, so that beetle was his name, And I called him Alexander but he answered just the same..." He shut the book with a snap, his smile gone soft. "Good times."

Arthur sort of wants to throw Eames out. He sort of wants Eames to stay, because he's bored out of his skull. (He sort of wants to go to Eames and lick him, but that's a very bad idea and unprofessional besides.)

Eames plops down on the couch. "So what else have you got to entertain you, beside nursery rhymes?"

Arthur indicates the puzzle, lying in pieces on the living-room floor. Eames' eyes widen comically. "That's all? That horrible, horrible man, stuffing you here all alone with only-" Eames inspected the puzzle box- "the Mojave desert for company."

"I'm fine by myself," Arthur says. This is a statement of fact and said as such, but he still cringes because he can't help but hear it in his grandmother's voice, which continues, 'In the dark, in the cold, no need for you to trouble yourself, no.'

(Fact: Half of Arthur's evasion skills were perfected during family events. The other half were honed when Mal tried to get him to taste her cooking.)

"We're not meant to live alone," Eames says, and if he bursts into song Arthur will shoot him, forgery utterly crucial to the case or no.

With finality, Arthur says, "I am." 

And that's meant to be the end of that conversation, except that Eames is twelve and can't resist imitating Arthur. "I am," he says, in a mocking schoolboy sort of voice. 

Arthur stares at him, incredulous. "Excuse me, aren't you supposed to be a forger? That didn't sound anything like me."

At this point, Eames is supposed to say something incredibly witty that boiles down to 'That's what she said', but as it happens, he does not.

What he does is smile ruefully at Arthur and say, "Well, I've always been shite at doing you, darling," and Arthur is left slack-jawed because holy shit there was a double entendre that Eames totally ignored. 

Well, hell if Arthur gives him time to amend that. "Am I hard to forge?" he asks.

Eames grimaces. "The bloody hardest."

Worse and worse. "I've seen forgers... imitate me," Arthur says, cautious. "Could you try?"

Obligingly, Eames shifts into Arthur. Arthur gets up, walks around him, feels his brow wrinkling. "Looks fine," he says.

Eames rolls his eyes. Arthur makes a mental note to do that less, as apparently it makes him look like a teenager. "Well, that's not too difficult, is it?" Eames says in his own voice. "The difficult part is the actions, the mannerisms," this said in Arthur's voice.

Arthur frowns. "I see what you're talking about." There's something not quite right about the voice coming out of Eames' mouth. And his hands – Eames is fidgeting. Arthur never fidgets.

Eames changes back. "There it is," he says, spreading his hands. "You're not an easy man to forge, love."

Arthur raises both eyebrows. "I wouldn't think I'd be that difficult."

Eames looks mournful. "You wouldn't, but that's because – forgive me, dearest, but it's true – you know absolutely nothing about forging."

Arthur is forced to acknowledge this. But. "Could you teach me?"

Eames' face knotted into a perplexed expression. "Forging? I highly doubt it, if you don't already know."

Arthur waves that off with a gesture. "Not the practice. The theory." He looks Eames in the eye, even and steady. "Even if there's nothing official about it, I'd be pretty surprised if you haven't figured out a thing or two."

Eames folds his arms on his chest and smirks at him, from which Arthur gathers he's intrigued. "And what's in it for me? That's my livelihood you want to poke your fingers into." 

Eames is testing him, Arthur knows. For a reaction, for a give. And maybe, this time, Arthur will let him have some.

"I'll tell you a secret," Arthur tells him, and by the gleam in Eames' eye he knows he was right.

~~

#12, Benjamin Blake:

Arthur woke up in a strange bed, sweat drying on him, dizzy from only four hours of sleep.

He felt fucking fantastic.

He stretched, got up and wandered downstairs, lazy and contented. This was his first time at Ben's house, so it took him a while to find the kitchen and figure out the coffee maker.

He heard a muffled noise behind him and turned, this being before he'd learned to assume all noises were hostile in source. As it happened, it was Ben, sitting next to the dining table with his head pillowed over his hands.

"Ben?" Arthur went to him, careful. "Is everything all right?"

Ben looked up at Arthur, his eyes red with misery. Arthur could now see he was clutching a bible. "Arthur," he said. "Have you ever considered repenting your wickedness and turning to Christ?"

"I'm Jewish," Arthur said, stupefied, and that was how he ended up on the street wearing only his underwear.

~~

"So. What's it to be, love?" Eames is smirking at him, cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. Arthur considers all the damage he could deal Eames with it, and gives it up as ineffective.

"You could start with telling me why I'm difficult to forge," Arthur says, and because sometimes it's fun to be mean to Eames, "difficult for you, I mean."

"You wound me," Eames says, with only half of his usual theatrics. "Also, I'll take my payment in advance, please."

Arthur narrows his eyes. "Really."

Eames nods.

Arthur thinks. "What do you want to know?" But Eames smiles and wags his finger.

"None of that, love." He sounds far too cheerful for Arthur's peace of mind. "You choose what to tell me."

Arthur purses his lips. This means he can keep anything he particularly cares about secret, but he doubts it's his best interests Eames has in mind. "I prefer to work alone," Arthur says.

Eames leans closer to him. "But that's hardly a secret, now, is it? You've told me as much not ten minutes ago."

He did, actually. Arthur considers. "I don't believe in God."

Eames stares at him, incredulous. "That's just not true. I know you're Jewish, Cobb told me."

So this was Eames' angle. "Well, I'm not going along with this if you're just going to discredit everything I say."

Arthur could, in theory, explain to Eames why what Cobb told him and what Arthur had just said weren't contradictory in the least, but he's really not in the mood for a debate about faith versus tradition versus some fucking respect for those who came before you. Arthur had yet to see Eames grasp the meaning of 'respect', anyway.

Eames blinks, and backs away very slightly. "All right. How about this. I'll tell you something now, and you'll owe me for that. Free sample, yeah?"

"Fine." Arthur sits back in his chair and looks at Eames. "Do I get to decide what you tell me?"

Eames shrugs. "If you want."

"Tell me why you can't forge me," Arthur says, too quickly. Eames stares at him, and he flinches. "What? It's a valid question."

"Did I say anything?" Eames says, all too innocent for someone whose face was, not a moment ago, fairly radiating 'Full of ourselves, aren't we?'. "All right. Arthur, do you know why I don't think you can be taught forging?"

"Because I'm a crappy actor," Arthur says.

Eames smiles at him, looking genuinely pleased. "I wouldn't have put it quite so bluntly, but yes. You have, however, mastered the poker-face, the deadpan expression. You are the ultimate straight man." He leers at Arthur, but only a little. Arthur makes a get-on-with-it gesture. 

"And so, the forging amateur," Eames says, some emphasis on that last word, "will take you at face value. The straight man is an archetype, and archetypes are bloody easy to do. Only," Eames raises his water glass to punctuate, "you aren't actually an archetype."

Arthur can't help grinning. "What gave me away?"

"Well-" Eames waves towards Arthur's legs, raised as he he leans back in the recliner. "This, for once. You talk like a schoolteacher and sit like a schoolboy. You act like you've got no bloody sense of humor at all, until some idiot says something ridiculous and then you make everyone laugh at them without changing expression once." 

Arthur tries very hard not to be pleased by that.

"And then," Eames shakes a finger at him, "you smile, and you have dimples."

"I can't help my face," Arthur says, feeling monumentally silly.

"Ah, but there's no reason you should want to," Eames says. "It's a perfectly delightful face. At any rate – do you understand?"

Arthur nods, slowly. "You can't forge what I appear to be on a casual glance, because it's not actually true. But you can't forge me, because..." He trails off, unsure.

Eames studies him, his gaze open and frank. "Because I don't really understand you." It sounds like an admission.

Hence, secrets, Arthur thinks. He knew Eames would be interested in that. "And how do you come to understand a person?" 

Eames smirks. "That's for next lesson. Meanwhile – pay up, darling."

Arthur could bargain. Arthur could argue and he'd make good points, and anyway he already got the answer he really wanted. 

Instead he says, "I used to bite my fingernails."

Eames brightens at that. "An oral fixation, Arthur? I wouldn't have thought that." Absurdly, that seems to make him even happier. "And no displacement activity, either. How did you give it up?"

Arthur shrugged. "I just did."

~~

#8, Melanie Stein:

"Ugh. Don't *do* that!" She smacked his hand down and frowned. "I hate it when you do that."

Arthur lowered his hand, resisting the urge to pick at his loose thumbnail. "Sorry."

She looked at him balefully. "Honestly, some days. Promise me you'll stop that."

"I promise," he said, but already knew it wouldn't matter. He'd promised to stop leaving the toilet seat up, and to close the toothpaste tube after he used it, and not to leave his dirty socks on the floor. He'd kept all of those promises, and it made no difference. She just found something new to yell at him about.

Why do you keep trying to pick fights with me? He wanted to ask her, but he didn't. He knew she wouldn't have an answer.

Later, in the bus station, shouldering the bag with his meager possessions on the journey back to his own damn dorm room, where he could be the dirty fucking slob he wanted to be (profanity hers), his hand rose to his mouth, and he dropped it with a twitch.

He did promise.

~~

When Eames leaves, Arthur takes a walk.

The level Arthur's stuck in is, in design, somewhere between a small town and a suburb: the houses all scream of yuppie design, but they're regularly interspersed with small shops selling quaint, useless things like clocks and candles.

The lawn to Arthur's left is home to gnome making a rude gesture. Arthur crushes his urge to wave at the ugly thing, but allows himself to break into a smile. He's missed Dom's designs.

Around the corner is a cafe, too distinctly French in atmosphere to blend in perfectly, but there's something weirdly organic about how it fits in. It doesn't make one think wait, that's not right; it rather makes Arthur think about pretentious customers and the business owners who cater to them.

Arthur sits. He's pretty sure the cafe is there for him, too, since Dom and the mark aren't supposed to frequent this part of the dream. Also because as soon as he sits down the waitress plunks a mug of tea in front of him, steaming hot, just the way he likes it.  
"Enjoy," she says with a wink. She looks a little like Jenny Greenfield, on whom Arthur had the world's biggest crush in tenth grade. This may account for Arthur's distraction, which is the reason he nearly jumps when he realizes Eames is sitting across from him.

Projection or actuality? It's hard to say, sometimes. Arthur's projections of Eames tend to the ridiculous, obvious caricatures of the man, but he'd seen a few that were startlingly realistic. And, of course, it could be Dom's projection.

There's one easy way to check. "Forge something," Arthur tells him.

Eames blinks but changes, willingly enough, into the mark's wife. Their waitress, who was bringing another cup of tea, startles visibly and nearly spills the entire contents of her tray on Eames.

"How entertaining," Eames says in Mrs. Kitts' faint Connecticut accent. "I think perhaps we'd better leave before the service mangles us further, dear."

Not having to pay for drinks, Arthur reflects, is one of the better things about dream worlds. Soon they're strolling down the street, which has subtly shifted into something more commercial looking. The stores they're passing boast fresh fruits and vegetables, bags of dry beans and rice and spices, fresh-baked bread and cookies. 

"Somebody must be hungry," Eames says, amused.

"Not me." A projection hurries past Arthur, knocking into him in the process. "Maybe the mark is. Maybe that's what has his subconscious all riled up."

Eames chuckles. "No, I'm actually afraid that would be me."

Arthur slants a look at him.

Eames' smile is secretive, almost coy. It looks absolutely nothing like him and utterly the same as every picture of Mrs. Kitts. "Now, darling, payment in advance. I did give you a free sample." His accent is slipping – moreover, his word usage is.

Eames is doing this on purpose, Arthur realizes. Which means the reason Kitts' subconscious won't accept them is that something is off with Eames' forgery. But try as Arthur might, he can't see anything wrong with it. 

Against his better intentions, Arthur is curious. He's also more than a little annoyed with Eames, who should know better than to play stupid games with Arthur.

"I was in the debate team in high school," Arthur tells him. "Now can you do something before they shove me into traffic?"

"There isn't any traffic," Eames says, but something subtle about him changes. The projections near them mellow out visibly.

"Traffic can be arranged," Arthur mutters darkly. "All right. What did you do?"

"Watch closely, pet." Eames winks at him, and dissolves.

Where Eames stood, there's now a blob of color in a vaguely feminine shape. It looks a bit like an impressionistic painting, except awful. It also moves wrong, in a way Arthur can't define but feels right down in his bones.

The projections around them are oblivious, going about their own business.

"This had better be worth what you're inflicting on my eyes," Arthur says levelly.

The Eames-blob smirks at him and somehow solidifies into something close enough to human that it doesn't make Arthur want to hurl. "Notice any reaction?"

"There wasn't any reaction." Arthur frowns. "Which is noteworthy, because you were attacked for doing a spot-on imitation and ignored while doing-" he waves at Eames – "That."

Eames is himself again, and the smile he grants Arthur is warm. "Precisely. Arthur, please describe our dear Mr. Kitts."

This is what Arthur does for a living. "Bald, middle-aged, wears glasses – ah." He thinks he's starting to see Eames' point.

"And doesn't see terribly well even with them. Whereas you, Arthur, have extremely good eyesight." Eames taps him on the forehead. 

"Hence, Kitts' subconscious expects to see Mrs. Kitts as a blur." Arthur nods to himself. "All right. But there was something else. You - " He gropes for words, runs the image again in his head. What was different, what should have-- "You were moving wrong."

Eames' eyebrows rise. "Very good, Arthur." His face returns to their usual, insufferably benign expression. "But not quite good enough. Since you've seen for yourself how his facial recognition abilities are like, you'll understand why Kitts tells people apart mostly by the way they move. In my first impression of Mrs. Kitts I'd moved like I would for a generic female form. Like so."

It doesn't seem like Eames is actually moving, but suddenly he looks like he's smaller, and Arthur could swear there was more of a curve to his hips.

"However, it transpires that Mrs. Kitts, despite all her charm, has all the physical grace of a mountain gorilla. Like so." The way Eames moves now isn't very different, Arthur realizes, than the way Eames moves when he's not on a job. It's careless and sloppy and unpleasant for Arthur to watch. 

"Now, mind you." Eames is himself again, walking too close to Arthur for comfort. "I can't forge just the mark's perceptions, easy as that would be, because I don't work solo and the reactions of those I worked with would give me away. What I generally have to do is merge the perception into the reality, which is harder than it looks."

Arthur nods. He remembers this, actually, from the test run they did before the first time they worked with Eames. Eames had forged Dom. Arthur had scoffed at his work as utterly unrealistic and lacking, until Eames showed Arthur the movie footage his Dom impression was based on.

The forge and the recording were completely identical, down to the last detail. When viewed side by side, Arthur couldn't tell them apart. But as soon as he was looking at Eames alone, Arthur was 100% certain something wasn't right.

Arthur, who knew about optical illusions, had begrudgingly accepted that Eames was as good as his opinion of himself. Truth be told, he has yet to let Arthur down, although he'd never actually say as much.

"So," Eames says. "Forging lesson number two: don't make it right, make it feel right. It's very similar to the ideas of architecture, actually."

Arthur scowls. Of course it is; of course it's something Arthur should have been able to understand by himself.

At he hasn't told Eames anything that was actually important.

~~

#3, Roger Martin

Jenny was Arthur's next-door neighbor. Jenny liked to walk around barefoot in the summer and hum snatches of tunes. Jenny wanted to learn to play the guitar but never had the discipline, so Arthur learned to play for her.

Roger was Jenny's boyfriend, but it was Arthur Jenny liked to talk to for hours. 

And not just talk. She would take Arthur by the hand to the empty stretch of land behind their houses, sit with him in grass so tall it hid both their faces from anyone who would come looking. Would push Arthur to the ground, crawl on top of him and kiss him until they were both breathless.

"You have a boyfriend," Arthur said. It was as much statement of fact as protest.

"But I want to kiss you." Not as in, You, not Roger. Jenny liked to kiss, and Jenny did what she liked.

It got awkward after a while. Roger would stare at Arthur in Debate, and Arthur would – not flush and look away, no, he had more control than that even in junior high – stare at Roger blankly. But he felt awkward. And told Jenny so, which in hindsight was a mistake of epic proportions.

When Jenny brought Roger to the field behind their houses, Arthur felt like he'd been slapped. He gritted his teeth and smiled, because there was no point in doing otherwise. Jenny always got her way in the end.

He didn't expect, as all three of them hid in the grass (Roger's movements ungainly, Arthur's practiced, and Jenny's infused with the everyday grace of everything she did), for Jenny to kiss him. But he let her, and kissed her back. 

As she pulled back, looking satisfied, Arthur registered the wary look on Roger's face. Arthur would have expected shock, but apparently Jenny had explained some things to Roger in advance.

Not all of them, though, because when Jenny said, "Now you kiss Arthur," Roger's jaw dropped. So would Arthur's if he weren't at peace with the fact that Jenny was insane.

"I'm not gay," Roger said numbly.

"So?" Jenny looked irritated. "It's just a kiss, don't be such a baby."

Arthur knew from experience it would be useless to try to explain to Jenny why refusing to kiss anyone could be for any reason better than a childish hangup. He sighed, feeling put upon, and waited for Roger to bow to the inevitable.

Roger kissed him.

More exactly: Roger touched his lips to Arthur's, almost disgusted. Almost shy. Arthur moved his mouth over Roger's, feeling reckless, because why not? 

At which Roger made a noise, and Arthur found himself in the familiar position of being pinned to the ground and kissed. He heard Jenny's soft laughter, heard the rustle of cloth that meant she had taken her shirt off. Roger kept kissing Arthur, clinging to him in a mindless sort of way. Arthur wrapped his arms around Roger and smiled into their mouths.

That was when Jenny's parents found them.

Arthur's parents just laughed about it, but Jenny ended up having to go to a different school and the next time Arthur ran into Roger between classes Roger shoved him into the lockers and growled at Arthur, "Stay the fuck away from me."

~~

Kitts is, technically, their client as well as their mark. He's an aspiring point man, who hired Dom to militarize him and Arthur to teach him the rudiments of the profession. 

What Kitts doesn't know is that his potential employer, who gave him Dom's number and Arthur's email, is paying them double to divulge to her anything interesting they find, most importantly any conflict in loyalties. Since Kitts was a government agent before turning to a life of dream-crime, it's not an unfounded assumption.

When Arthur got his mail, he sent back him a list of names and photos and wrote, "Start with their social security numbers. Write to me when you know their weaknesses and we'll take it from there."

(Arthur did add a few useful search key-words and databases for Kitts to use. He's not a total hardass.)

The important fact here being, Kitts has never actually seen Arthur. To the best of Arthur's knowledge – which is pretty damn good, if he does say so himself – Kitts has no idea what Arthur looks like. For this reason, Arthur can sit on a park bench and be entertained by the sight of Kitts' projections tearing Dom apart. It's not that he's so petty as to still be angry at Dom for that bullet to the kneecap, except for how he kind of is. But only a little.

Dom dies. Arthur sips his tea.

An hour later Dom reappears next to Arthur, looking thoroughly disgruntled. "You could at least pretend not to enjoy that."

Arthur widens his eyes. He knows that doesn't actually make him look innocent, but he can try. "Enjoy what?"

Dom narrows his eyes at him. Arthur holds his gaze. At last, Dom sighs. "Why do I even bother?"

Arthur shrugs. "Search me."

"Don't bloody tempt me," Dom says, but now Arthur recognizes faint traces of Eames' voice.

Arthur stands up, abruptly. "What are you doing." His voice is flat; it's nothing like a question.

Eames flows back into himself, grinning at Arthur like the asshole he is. "Having a bit of fun." His voice sharpens a bit. "Nothing worse than what you were doing, I'm sure."

Arthur mimes confusion. "I was just sitting here."

The look Eames gives him is sharp as well. "If you don't want me to play games, don't start them."

"It's not like it was me shredding Cobb," Arthur says for clarification's sake. "Look, if you knew how many times he got me shot--"

"Not to the exact number," Eames says, something like concession in his voice. "But somewhere in the triple digits. About three hundred and ten, yeah?"

"I. Uh." Arthur blinks at him. "How the fuck do you know that?"

"Research, Mr. Eames," Eames says in Arthur's own voice.

Arthur's taken aback. "That's. Actually much better than last time."

Eames rolls his eyes, but Arthur can tell he's pleased. "It's three words. I've heard you use them often enough. Please don't insult my skills, Arthur."

"Yeah, I'd rather insult your tie, anyway," Arthur shoots back, almost automatically. "I mean, are those impressonistic snowmen or what--"

Eames stands up. "Lovely as it is to have you mocking my sartorial choices," he says, almost clipped, "I am actually here in a professional capacity. So if you don't mind," he shoves past Arthur, "goodbye."

Arthur sits back. One of them kicked his cup of tea over, and it's spilling into the grass.

~~ 

A few hours later, he's pacing in his dream-apartment, rubbing his hands together against the sudden chill of the dream. He's still trying to figure our what the ever-living fuck happened.

He's startled out of his thoughts by a knock on the door. Arthur peers out the window – no crowd of projections closing in, that's good. But he knows Dom has to spend every minute he's in this level with the mark, which means this has to be – 

Eames stands on his doorstep, holding a cup of tea. Arthur gestures him in, cautious.

"I think I should apologize," he tells Eames. He has no idea what he should apologize for, but Eames isn't the type to throw hissy fits for no reason.

Eames looks rueful. "In fact, I came to do just that." He hands Arthur the tea, and adds, "apologize, that is. And ask you if you wanted to continue our little lessons."

Of course Arthur does. What else does he have to occupy himself with? Even watching Dom dies horribly gets boring (or, to be honest, gut-churning awful) after a while. 

"I'm a horrible person," Arthur says to the silence between them.

Eames' expression isn't quite a smile. "Is that meant to be a secret?"

Arthur laughs, short and devoid of humor. "No. Just an observation."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ( And since then she's a thief and weaver/ And a king and a beggar both. )

#4, Darren Shane

Arthur was changing out of his running shorts when he heard footsteps behind him. He stiffened, not afraid but wary. Nobody had seriously messed with him since elementary school, but patterns were made to be broken.

"Hey, freak," someone said behind him, and Arthur turned around slowly to look Darren Shane in the face.

"Hey, motherfucker," he said, because it's as good an answer as any.

Shane shoved him against the lockers. Arthur smirked at him, lazy and slow, close-mouthed.

"Martin says you're a cocksucker, freak." Shane slammed Arthur back. 

Arthur kind of despised Shane. He'd been with Arthur in elementary – incidentally, he used to mess with Arthur back then – and he'd transferred to Arthur's high school a month ago after he'd been expelled from his previous school. He seemed to think Arthur was still the shortest kid in class.

To be perfectly honest, Arthur was. He'd also been learning Taekwondo for six years now. He did try to warn the bullies off by wearing all black and getting an eyebrow piercing, but some of them proved too dumb to push off. 

This was starting to annoy Arthur.

"Got a problem with cocksuckers, asshole?" He broke Shane's hold easily. Arthur turned them around, pretty as a pirouette, so that Shane would be the one with his back to the metal. "Maybe you want to be one," he whispered into Shane's ear.

It was meant to enrage, to make Shane's face red, to maybe make him punch Arthur in the face; the black eye Arthur would get would be gone in a week, but Shane would be suspended for the rest of the year.

Instead Shane gaped at Arthur, wordless, and kissed him messily.

What the fuck, Arthur thought, dizzy, as Shane grabbed his shoulders. Then he thought, What the hell, and threw Shane to the floor. He'll fucking show him who's the cocksucker.

It was as much gloating as anything else, the thrill he got from shoving his cock into Shane's mouth. It certainly wasn't due to any skill Shane had at it, and Arthur told him so. In spite of this, he came pretty damn fast. He didn't bother warning Shane, and was frankly got more satisfaction watching Shane choke on his come than he got from coming. He told Shane this, too. 

Shane was lying on the floor, shuddering and panting, when Arthur got to his feet. Arthur aimed one last menacing smile at Shane when he saw that Shane had come in his pants.

It felt like an echo, afterwards, to walk in the halls and run into Shane. Shane who left the football team, who, when Arthur walked by, did his level best to vanish into the background.

Arthur tried very hard to feel guilty about that. He failed miserably.

~~

Eames, insolently, puts his feet up on Arthur's coffee table. "So what shall I show you next, pet?" 

Arthur's reasonably sure that Eames is trying to get a rise out of him. Even after trading apologies, there's something tense humming in the air between them. He ignores the subject of Eames' filthy shoes on his furniture. "What, no payment?"

"Well, you did reveal your horrifyingly low self esteem just now," Eames says, magnanimous. 

Arthur ignores that. "I used to have an eyebrow piercing," he says.

Eames looks at Arthur, surprised – surely not at what Arthur just told him, he thinks, but maybe at the fact that Arthur technically volunteered information freely. (He'd considered telling Eames about the Taekwondo, but he dislikes the expression Eames gets when Arthur tells him things he knows already.)

Eames stands up next to where Arthur leans again the kitchen wall. He raises a hand, then freezes. "Uh. May I?"

It's only then that Arthur realizes Eames had been reaching for him. For his face, to be accurate. Probably to try and feel out that ancient scar. Purely for the sake of being true to form, Arthur should offer to break Eames' fingers.

"Go ahead," he says instead, and knows why he did it when he registers the brief, blank look on Eames' face.

Eames looks at him, intent, and drags a thumb over Arthur's eyebrow. It lingers for barely a moment. "Can you..." Eames swallows. Arthur wonders why. "I wonder what you looked like, with one." 

Arthur shrugs. He's no forger but he can do this, assume the form of his younger self. Of course, this means that along with the piercing he regains the floppy long hair, the stupid flaming-skull t-shirt and the torn jeans.

Also the fucking height. He barely reaches Eames' shoulder now.

By the glint in Eames' eyes, he's barely restraining himself from laughing. It doesn't exactly make Arthur happy, but he does appreciate the effort.

"Seen enough?" God, he's forgotten his stupid voice. He's barely spoken above a whisper until twelve grade. He'd made damned sure that in school, no one could hear him squeak.

Then again, the noises Eames is making now aren't exactly dignified.

Arthur shifts back. Eames vents his laughter into a relieved cough. Patient, Arthur waits for him to settle down.

"Well. After such a marvelous demonstration, I can hardly be stingy with you, darling." Eames gestures expansively. "I am fully at your service."

This requires a moment of thought, after which Arthur says, "When you have to do a seduction, how do you choose what to forge?"

"Excellent question, Mr. Mann." Eames fucking beams at him. Arthur wonders, briefly, who told Eames his last name. He decides to blame Cobb, because that's generally easiest. 

Out of nowhere, a whiteboard appears in the middle of Arthur's living-room. This surprises a short bark of laughter out of Arthur. Eames grins at him.

"Obviously, you have to take the mark's basic preferences into account," he says. "Men, women, barnyard animals. Please don't laugh, I truly wish I wasn't serious." He draws a circle on the whiteboard, and writes 'ORIENTATION' in it. "After that, there's secondary preferences: Blondes or brunettes, breast and/or penis size –"

"And/or," Arthur repeats, slightly weak.

Eames rolls his eyes at him. "Try not to be so narrow minded, darling, I like to think better of you." He draws a smaller circle with the first and writes 'PREFERENCES'. "And after that – " The smile he aims at Arthur is slightly conspiratorial, "that's where the real fun starts." Eames tilts his head, putting on a show of concentrating.

Arthur's somehow not surprised at all when Eames shifts into the rapidly-becoming-familiar figure of Mrs. Kitts.

"I'll do two versions of her, now," Eames tells him. "And we'll see if you can find the genuine one, so to speak. Yeah?"

Arthur waves at him to continue. 

"This is version one." Eames twirls around, slowly. Arthur commits as much as he can to memory. "Okay?"

Arthur nods. 

"And this," Eames says, "is version two." He doesn't appear to have changed at all. "Can you tell them apart, darling?"

As a matter of fact, Arthur can't. He would suspect Eames of not changing at all in some kind of attempt to trick Arthur, but this isn't the kind of game Eames plays. 

He must have changed, but it wasn't anything Arthur could pick up at a glance, even a searching one. Whatever the difference was, it would be something Arthur would be able to – if not notice, then deduce, because Eames wasn't petty enough to enjoy setting Arthur a challenge that was actually impossible.

Arthur thinks, again, of his description of Mr. Kitts.

He steps up to Eames and grabs his wrist. Mrs. Kitts. Arthur notices absently, has very nice-looking fingers. For a moment, Arthur thinks he was mistaken, that the change was something about the clothes or the manicure, something Eames wouldn't have expected him to notice. Except of course Arthur would have noticed that.

He lifts Eames' hand to his mouth and turns it to delicately sniff at the wrist. There's perfume there, faint and floral. "Now the other version." he tells Eames softly, and is satisfied to notice that the wrist now smells of nothing at all, particularly.

He's tempted to call this one a fake, but he has a feeling. He leans closer and sniffs at Eames' neck. There's a smell there, not of perfume but of warm skin and the slightest hint of sweat.

Arthur leans back. "This one."

For a moment, he can't read Eames' expression at all. "Very good," Eames says at length. "Back to what I was saying." He turns to the board and writes 'PERSONALIZATION' inside the smallest circle. "What the mark would find most appealing is not always – in fact, I'm tempted to say 'almost never' – what you'd expect."

"Yeah," Arthur says, dry as dust. "Color me surprised."

~~

#13, Adam Merrily

There was something almost textbook about Adam, as if he sprang fully formed out of an after-school special. It wasn't that he was a bad boy, because that would have been too normal for Arthur.

Instead, Adam acted like some caricature of The Good Boyfriend. Arthur kept sneaking glances at him from the corner of his eye, waiting for some sort of crack in the demeanor. Arthur was certain it was all an act. It had to be.

Adam had smiled at Arthur with perfect white teeth, had pulled his chair back for him at the restaurant. He laughed politely at Arthur's jokes, shared an appropriate amount of information regarding his family (two younger sisters), his studies (med school, for crying out loud), his extracurricular activities (swim team and Black Student Union) and his musical tastes (Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles).

Arthur eyed him askance ever since that. Not that there anything wrong or even exceptional about liking the Beatles, but – no, that was exactly it. Everybody liked the Beatles. Anyone who brought them up on a discussion of music was either, #1, an insane groupie, #2, afraid to discuss his real tastes for whatever reason or, #3, a hopelessly bland human being.

Arthur had given up on #2 already and was ready to despair of #1. 

He even walked Arthur home, much to his dismay. "I can kick a man's brain out through his ribcage, you know," Arthur very carefully didn't say, because he'd said shit like that on dates before and it tended to end up awkward. 

At the entrance to Arthur's apartment building, Adam stopped. "I had a really fun evening," he said softly. His voice, Arthur was willing to concede, was fucking gorgeous. He wasn't bad-looking overall, in fact, but rather so generically good-looking that Arthur's eyes glossed right over him.

He was also, Arthur found out shortly, a fucking fantastic kisser. Arthur leaned back, glassy-eyed, and licked his lips.

"Want to come upstairs?" he asked, because he was willing to revise his opinion of this evening so far. He was flexible like that. Given incentive he could be flexible in a whole variety of other ways, too.

Adam smiled at him, almost gently. "Not tonight, I think." He took a step back. "Are you doing anything on Monday? How do you feel about Italian?"

Arthur was about to express very strong feelings indeed on the subject of Italian food and, more importantly, cockteasing bastards, before his roommate Chrissy wandered by and saved him from himself.

"But why did you have to accept on my behalf," Arthur groaned, later. He wasn't being ungrateful; he was, after all, helping her wash the glitter out of her hair while he was at it. 

"I don't know, because I actually like you and I have eyes?" Chrissy ducked her hair into the sink. "I mean, have you looked at him?"

Arthur shrugged. "I asked him up and he wouldn't come," he said, just skirting by petulance. "I know he didn't need to get up early or anything, I planned our evening better than that. It doesn't bode well."

Chrissy snorted, which had the hilarious effect of getting enough glitter up her nose to make her look like a coked-up fairy. After she finished sneezing, she said, "I don't know, I think it's sweet. Romantic."

Arthur groaned. "Okay, first of all, despite what I've heard people say, I'm not actually female. I'm a guy. I have a dick."

"I'll take your word for it," Chrissy said hurriedly.

"What I mean is, I don't give a fuck about romance." Arthur grimaced. "Also, what's so fucking romantic about blue balls?"

Chrissy squinted at him through glitter-encrusted eyelids. It was kind of gross, actually. "Arthur," she said slowly, "didn't anyone tell you? Blue balls are what romance is."

Arthur retreated at that, with a bleak mutter of, "Serves me right for rooming with English majors."

The second date, actually, went fairly well. This time, Arthur thought ahead and jerked off in advance. He also quoted all his best hipster literature at Adam, who looked suitably taken aback.

"I don't know," Adam said. "I mean, is it so wrong to want your poetry to rhyme?"

Arthur (who deep down inside still thought W. H. Auden was the best poet ever and had a secret fondness for Edward Lear) said, "You have to break the rules for them to mean anything, Adam." He wasn't even sure what he meant, but it sounded profound and he liked watching Adam twitch.

The careful balance of that date – three parts lustful thoughts to four parts straight-faced baiting – kept Arthur afloat for three more dates, after which he'd decided that either he was getting some or Adam was getting lost. Fortunately, Arthur never had to issue an ultimatum, because Adam followed him upstairs that night of his own volition.

The sex was... not bad, Arthur thought, lying in bad afterwards. There wasn't anything negative to say about it. Slow and gentle and not bad at all.

He had no idea why he was so embarrassed by the memory of it.

He smiled at Adam in the morning, tentatively. After all, not-bad sex deserved a repeat chance to turn it into something actually good. Adam smiled back, but there was something automatic about it, something preoccupied in Adam's expression.

"I'll see you around," Arthur said as Adam left, and already knew he wouldn't.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. Not that he was upset that Adam had broken it off. It was just, well. Adam's next boyfriend was named Mickey and happened to be Chrissy's best friend. This was why Arthur learned that Mickey had blown Adam in the backseat of his car on the first date, that Mickey liked to take Adam to Beat Poetry evenings in every coffee shop downtown, that Adam ended up dropping from med school and starting a degree in philosophy.

Mickey had a pierced lip and a haircut that flopped over his eyes. It was then that Arthur took out his piercing, started slicking back his hair and stopped wearing skinny jeans, just because he'd realized how fucking stupid it looked.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ( On the top of the Crumpetty Tree / The Quangle Wangle sat, / But his face you could not see, / On account of his Beaver Hat. )

Eames shifts easily, quickly, going through the different forms with the same ease his hands go through decks of cards.  
  
 _Nothing up my sleeve,_  Arthur thinks, and it makes him smile because Eames doesn't even need sleeves for that. Eames hides everything in plain sight.  
  
Eames is himself again, sprawled on Arthur's couch, smirking. He stretches extravagantly, his shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of tanned, hard stomach that Arthur is most certainly not looking at.  
  
"Anything else?" Arthur says, because being an asshole is as good a distraction as any.  
  
Except apparently it isn't, because Eames  _looks_  at him, and stills for a moment, the way he does only when he's either surprised or furious.  
  
"Arthur," he says, and Arthur could have said something snappish and looked away if only his voice wasn't so fucking gentle.  
  
Arthur stares up at the ceiling, feeling a hot flush crawl up his neck. "Yeah," he says.  
  
"You're really not hiding this half as well as you think you do. You may as well stop trying." Eames' tapping fingers belie the lightness of his tone.   
  
Arthur wishes he didn't know Eames was doing it on purpose, had to be doing this on purpose. Forgers trained themselves out of tells like this, everyone knew that, but sometimes manufactured emotion wasn't a lie. Sometimes it was the only way to let people  _know_.  
  
"Then I must have overestimated you, Mr. Eames," he says, quiet, "because I'm not trying at all."  
  
Eames' movements are sharp as he gets up. Not angry, precisely, but wary. For once, Arthur is glad when Eames leaves.  
  
He allows himself – for once, just this once – to be stupid and sentimental. He lets himself sit on the couch, still warm from Eames' body, relax into it and let go of himself for a little.  
  
 _It's good to want_ , his mother used to say, and boy, was she ever wrong.  
  
The worst thing is that he knows, he knows Eames wants the same thing. Eames could lie to Arthur, easy as breathing – easy as controlling well-placed pauses and glances, keeping the cadences of his words in line. This is what Eames does.  
  
This is why Arthur knows Eames is being honest. Eames has no reason whatsoever to lie.  
  
But what does that mean, telling a lie? From Arthur's point of view – Arthur, who deals in numbers and facts, in quantifiables – a lie and a mistake are one and the same. It makes no fucking difference.  
  
Arthur doesn't believe in curses, in destiny, but he is an empiricist. You can't argue with facts. Although, in full honesty, it had taken Arthur years to stop trying.  
  
~~  
  
#14, Shawna Carver  
  
"What's with all these layers?" she'd asked him, on their first date.  
  
"The appeal of mystery," Arthur had answered, only half-kidding.  
  
He hadn't been wearing a suit when he first saw her. If he had, he learned later, she'd never have spoken to him. But as it happened he'd been out jogging, hair floppy and clothes ridiculous, when he saw a gorgeous young woman sitting on a bench and reading.  
  
He couldn't help tracking the title, it was just something his eyes did. He didn't even need to stop running for that. And because his brain was slower than his eyes, this being morning, he'd run another minute before he did a double take.  
  
That did not mix well with the inertia of running, and so he'd nearly wound up being a messy pile of Arthur all over the sidewalk, but fortunately he'd always been quick on his feet. By the time he'd sorted himself out, she was looking at him, eyes bright, evidently trying very hard not to laugh.  
  
"Hey," he said, out of breath. "Is that – is that Akhmatova in the original?"  
  
The smile flickered, then resumed tenfold. "You read Russian?"  
  
He smiled back at her, because he couldn't not. "I just know the alphabet," he confessed. "I don't actually understand anything, all I've read by her was in translation."  
  
"You really should read the originals," she said, tilting her head a little. It felt almost studied, like she'd learned it in one of those stupid body-language classes;  _to signify sexual interest, lick your lips_.  
  
It was endearing all the same, and Arthur felt himself drawn closer, felt his head tilt to match her angle. "Maybe you could tell me about it," he said in a smooth convincing voice that didn't sound anything like him. "I could take you out to dinner sometimes?" The near-squeak there, at the end – now, that was definitely him.  
  
Her eyes narrowed. "Depends."  
  
"On?" He stifled the urge to tap a foot. Arthur hadn't fidgeted since high school.  
  
Her smile widened. "On whether you impress me." She took the piece of paper she'd been using as a bookmark and scribbled something on it. "This is my e-mail," she said. "You have a three days window in which to be interesting. Good luck."  
  
Later, though, she'd told him he won her over on basis of his email address alone. He'd grumbled over all the effort he'd put into finding things for her – silly, disjointed things, close-up pictures of praying mantises and subway maps and Wikipedia articles about prime numbers – but he couldn't really resent it.  
  
She was lovely, in every possible way, and Arthur must have known from the start it would come to this.  
  
"Are you gay?" she'd asked him one evening, without preamble, over dinner at her place.  
  
Arthur rolled his eyes. "It's called being gentlemanly, geez."   
  
He was, in fact, feeling a little defensive about how they haven't had sex yet after dating for three months. It wasn't that he didn't want to, not at all, but... There was something going on that he couldn't quite put his finger on, and so Arthur exercised caution.  
  
"Not that." Shawna looked him, grave. "Look, you can tell me." She reached for his hand.  
  
With a sick abruptness, Arthur realized she wasn't joking. "What are you talking about?" he said, snatching his hand away without quite meaning to.  
  
"I know already, okay?" God, why did she have to look so  _compassionate_  saying that? "I know about Adam," she said, quiet. "And, and some of the others. You really don't have anything to be ashamed of –"  
  
With a snarl, Arthur rose and stalked over to the bookshelf. He grabbed a dictionary, opened it and laid it on the table, flipping through the pages none too gently until he found the entry for 'Bisexual'.  
  
"Need me to marker that for you?" he said, probably more vicious than was strictly warranted, but God, he  _hated_  it when people got like that. Like they found a tidy neat label to put him under and everything else he was just didn't mean anything.  
  
Shawna didn't flush easily, but Arthur could see the tips of her ears growing pinker, could see embarrassment in the purse of her lips and the tilt of her head, and he couldn't stand it.  
  
"So come on, if it's so important," he said, forcibly gentling himself, reigning in his posture and his balance to speak for him:  _I'm here. I won't hurt you._  
  
They went to bed, then, and Arthur half-felt he was taking on some sort of dare.  
  
He took his clothes off for her, and she stared at him. When he was naked she took off her dress, and Arthur  _ached_  at the sight of her, finally; dark smooth skin, the elegant structure of her bones, the gentle curves of the muscles in her arms, in her thighs.  
  
He hungered for her, and for the first time, he let her see that.  
  
When he opened her mouth, she flinched.  
  
Arthur stilled. "Shawna," he said, his mouth dry.  
  
"Come over here," she said, fiercely, and dragged him into bed.   
  
It was good; it was wonderful between them, desire stoked for ages bursting into flames. And then it was done, and she looked at him and said nothing.  
  
"What?" he said, unnerved by the weight of her gaze.  
  
He'd expected her to say  _Nothing_ , to circle and circle around whatever it was they weren't saying. But she looked him in the eye and said, "This wasn't what I expected."  
  
Infuriated, Arthur very nearly spat it. "What did you expect, then?"  
  
She looked at him, silently assessing, and said, "More."  
  
In the end, he put his suit on, piece by piece, and slunk to his own house to sleep on the couch, fully clothed. He couldn't shake off the feeling that if he took it off he might not find anything underneath.  
  
~~  
  
Arthur should be more careful. He's letting himself get away with too much. He knows this. For this reason he doesn't go out, looking for Eames or otherwise.  
  
Instead, he reads.  
  
The books around him contain only texts he's memorized, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when he's feeling shaken and uncertain.   
  
The book in his hands is thin with a shiny, yellow-orange cover, and Arthur tries to do the voices the way he did them when he last read this aloud. " _And they carefully trained a real smart dog named Daniel,_ " he reads, with the slight Southern drawl he likes to adopt for the narrator, " _to serve as our country’s first gun-toting spaniel._ "  
  
There's a slow clap coming from behind him, and Arthur doesn't have to turn around to know Eames is there.  
  
He turns anyway, and looks, and doesn't try to guard himself at all because there's just no point any more.  
  
Eames has a glint in his eyes, the way he always does just before doing something inadvisable. "So sorry," he says, light and fake. "Couldn't stay away."  
  
"Don't you have a job to do," Arthur grouses, but it's futile and he knows it. He watches Eames, wary; Eames is, technically, just standing there, but it feels like he's circling Arthur.  
  
Eames has an excellent sense of timing, a very clever understanding of the weak spots in people's armor. This has been a long time coming, and Arthur is tired of holding up, holding everything in.  
  
It had to happen, eventually.  
  
Arthur almost feels resigned as Eames stalks close, kneeling on the rug beside couch, his face mere inches from Arthur's. "Yeah?" Eames asks, and there's something so bright about him that Arthur can't stand to look.  
  
Instead of answering, Arthur asks, "Can you forge me now?"  
  
Something shifts in Eames' expression. He nods, just, and Arthur's staring at his own face.  
  
Because there's no point in not doing so, Arthur yields to temptation and grabs Eames – grabs himself – by the hair, wrenching the forgery's head back. Arthur looks himself in the eyes.  
  
His eyes are dark; Arthur knows this, but they've never seemed so blank to him, reflecting but unyielding, unlike Eames' own changeable eyes. The forgery's expression is blank, the expression Arthur wears when he's angry or confused or any of a hundred different emotions.  
  
Eames is still under his hands. It's not Eames' stillness, which comes of the control you learn when you've caused damage once too often by moving in an untimely manner. Nor Arthur's, which is his default, which is tense and alert and waiting to strike.  
  
It's not even the stillness of the Straight Man, of the archetype, a rigidity which is part of the face one must present to the world at times.  
  
It's a blankness. It's nothing at all, and it's terrifying.  
  
It's what Arthur looks like, to anyone who can see.  
  
Arthur doesn't close his eyes, doesn't look away. "Change back," he tells Eames, steady and unwavering.  
  
Then it's Eames' hair under Arthur's hand, stiff with too much gel, warm scalp underneath, and Arthur can breath again. He lowers his mouth to meet Eames, who surges up to him.   
  
It has to be good, Arthur resolves. If it happens now, just now, it has to be perfect. Arthur can stand it if this turns from a hope into a memory, but the thought of it becoming a  _bad_  memory makes him want to grind his teeth.  
  
He sinks them into Eames' shoulder instead, savagely pleased as Eames yelps and grabs Arthur harder, pulling them close. He ravages Eames' mouth, touches everywhere, greedy because there's no such thing as a second chance.  
  
Eames shifts to follow him, and as he moves his form shifts, as well. Arthur can't tell if he's doing this on purpose, whether Eames is trying to tell him something or is just all over the place, overcome by manic glee that he's finally getting his way.  
  
As he pushes inside Eames (God, he loves dreams, loves it when they just flow into position) Arthur moans, " _Yes_."  
  
Arthur catches Eames' sharp, startled gaze right before he comes. By the time he's recovered, sated and sticky from Eames' come where it sprayed all over his stomach, the look is gone.  
  
That doesn't matter. This is hardly Arthur's first time in this particular game. He knows exactly what Eames had been thinking.  
  
It makes him prickly, and so, when Eames purrs at him, "Another go, darling?" Arthur says  
"No, thanks, no," wipes himself on the sheet and gets up.  
  
Eames is looking at him, unscrutable. "Another forging lesson, then?"  
  
It feels almost like a concession, which makes Arthur unreasonably angry. "I should pay you, then," he says.  
  
Eames stretches and makes a noncommittal noise. Possibly he's trying to distract Arthur. Arthur's mood is not improved by the fact that it's working.  
  
"I've never slept with anyone more than once," Arthur says, with cold deliberation, and by Eames' sudden lack of movement he knows he hit his target precisely.  
  
~~  
#6-11, Belle Alvarez, Tina Kowalski, Donnie, Alan Boleyn, Unknown, Unknown  
  
He'd met Belle at a party, where she amused him by cracking bad puns, raised his hopes by fluttering her eyelashes at him, crushed them by introducing Arthur to her boyfriend, then raising them again by casually letting a mention of an open relationship slip.  
  
She rose from Arthur's bed half naked and crying. "I can't do this," she sobbed. "I can't, I feel so horrible, I can't – "   
  
Arthur, at a loss, ended up calling her boyfriend for her. In the end, it turned out Belle just wasn't cut out for non-monogamous relationships. Her boyfriend gave him an apologetic shrug and took her home, a solicitous arm thrown around her shoulders.  
  
Tina he'd met at a friend's house on a Friday night potluck supper. She had huge brown eyes and a shy smile, and she touched Arthur's arm as they left and asked him to take her home.  
  
She started crying before they even made it to the bed. Arthur, after much coaxing, discovered the problem was a crisis of faith.  
  
"I don't even know what I want," Tina said, sniffling. Arthur held out a handkerchief for her, which she accepted with gratitude and used to mop out the corners of her eyes.   
  
 _I don't know what you want, either,_  Arthur wanted to say, but didn't.   
  
"I mean, my mom tells me, find a nice, Jewish boy," Tina said. "And – and I want to have fun, but I  _try_ and I just feel like I'm doing something  _wrong_ , something I shouldn't."  
  
"I'm Jewish, you know." Arthur really wished he didn't have to keep telling people that.  
  
"Yeah, but I didn't know that when I came home with you," Tina said, and that kind of sealed the conversation.  
  
When Arthur whined to Chrissy about this, she chose to point out, "One: Two bad dates aren't a pattern."  
  
"All right," Arthur conceded. "What's two?"  
  
"Two," Chrissy said, expertly twisting her hair into tiny knots, "maybe, I don't know. If you're just looking for sex, maybe you shouldn't start having intimate soul-baring conversations with people."  
  
Arthur rolled his eyes. "I do not. Do you even know me?"  
  
Chrissy gave him a wry look. "Better than you know me. Quick, what's my favorite color?"  
  
It was a trick question that Arthur refused to answer to, mostly because he didn't know the answer. But he did take Chrissy's advice to heart when Chrissy's hipster friends dragged him along to a club.  
  
He spotted the guy sitting across the bar, and only a shouted exchange of names and heated glances took place before they were in a back alley, rubbing against each other, frantic.  
  
"Oh," Donnie sobbed against him, "Oh,  _oh_ ," and with a belated start Arthur realized that this was not a sex noise.  
  
No, Donnie was actually crying.  
  
Arthur pulled away, cautious, patting Donnie's head. "Uh. Are you okay?"  
  
Donnie raised his eyes and rasped, "Really not," and Arthur slunk back into the party.  
  
"No, seriously," Chrissy's friend Ronnie said later when Chrissy was regaling everyone with Arthur's romantic woes (against, it should be mentioned, Arthur's explicit objections). "You can't possibly be  _that_ bad in bed."  
  
"Fuck you," Arthur said, more glum than angry because frankly he was starting to question this himself.  
  
So it was that he ended up on a date with Chrissy's friend Alan, who gave Arthur an amused look and said, "Funny, you don't  _look_  hopeless."  
  
"Yeah, I did hear that's supposed to be funny," Arthur said. "Strange how it isn't." But thank goodness, Alan laughed at that, and Arthur honestly thought he had a fucking chance until Alan looked aside and turned ghost-white.  
  
"My ex," Alan'd explained later, eyes heavy-lidded from the late hour and the vodka they'd been swilling. "Fuck. I can't believe I'm still in love with her." He laughed, self-deprecating. "I'm such a train wreck."  
  
"What're you here for, then?" Arthur was trying hard not to slur.  
  
"You, my friend," Alan pointed the bottle at him, "are meant to be my rebound fuck. My first step on the road to recovery."  
  
Arthur hummed and said, "In that case, let's get therapeutic."   
  
Afterwards, Alan quietly said, "It didn't work."  
  
Arthur said, "Yeah, didn't think so," and shooed Alan gently away so he could at least get some fucking sleep.  
  
The time after that he didn't even bother with names, just found a party, found a girl who wasn't too drunk and was quite happy to wrap her legs around Arthur's waist as he fucked her against the wall.  
  
He spotted her again when he next went prowling. She lifted a bottle at him in mock-salute and looked away. Arthur sighed and let the next guy who bought him a drink drag him to behind the club's back entrance for quick and dirty blow-jobs.  
  
He didn't bother looking for that guy the next time he went there. Arthur was many things, but slow learner wasn't one of them.


End file.
